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Comment by fzeroracer | Hacker News Reader

The absurdity of what you pose only works in scenarios where the food makers have not already been found to be poisoning you for the sake of profit.

If food makers (or the makers of school supplies in this case) didn't want to kill you, then why is there high levels of lead in the food, a substance which is known to be very toxic? The free market should've caused any lead products to be free market'd out of existence by now, given how much we know. Even more absurd is your claim of violence, considering you don't seem to consider people being exposed to dangerous levels of lead as being 'violent' in this scenario. Or is it just less violent then having to pay taxes?

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You are making the assumption that there are high levels of lead in the food BECAUSE food makers want to kill you. How is this not absurd to you?

We do not have free market, we have a pretty tightly regulated market.

> Even more absurd is your claim of violence, considering you don't seem to consider people being exposed to dangerous levels of lead as being 'violent' in this scenario. Or is it just less violent then having to pay taxes?

Excuse me? They are two different instances of violence. What you are trying to do is solve violence by more violence. How did that ever work out?

It is funny how my claim of an instance of violence is absurd merely because of an assumption which is "you don't consider people being exposed to dangerous levels of lead as being violent". Governments stealing money at gunpoint is violent, regardless of the second part, which, again, was just an absurd assumption from you.

I am not sure what you are trying to achieve here.

No, online shopping for the most part is a fairly unregulated market. You can't seriously make the argument that a more free market would solve this problem, because lead poisoning is an open and shut case. There is no excuse for exposing people to lead like this.

At this point, excessive amounts of lead should be seen as malice and regulated out of existence. What other excuse would there be for such phony products to be sold, other than to make a quick profit at the expensive of other's health?

And no, they are not completely unrelated. This is a thread and topic about toxic school supplies having excessive amounts of lead. When people proposed regulations to fix this problem, you equated that to violence. You are directly connecting the two.

Sigh.

"Government stealing money from taxpayers" is what I equated to violence. Do you care to argue that it is not violent?

No it is not. You can renounce your US citizenship (or most other citizenships for that matter) hat was forced upon you after birth - instead you chose stay and whine.

Too bad you cannot renounce education, healthcare etc that were also forced upon you by the state.

Yeah, or I could move to Mars, I know.

I, for one, am happy to not fund the bombing of innocent people through the taxes I pay. I am not sure you could say the same. :)

And for the record:

> Renouncing U.S. citizenship doesn't free you from U.S. tax obligations and means that even after the renunciation, the IRS could still audit and assess taxes and penalties.

Exit tax and anything you owed - yes. But you no longer need to pay tax to US on your worldwide income (assuming you move out and not have US assets) like citizens do.

Even on Mars there would be society that will enforce its rules on you. See a pattern here?

Yes, I do. There is no escape from the arms of the Government, and society != government anyway.

>You can renounce your US citizenship (or most other citizenships for that matter) hat was forced upon you after birth

Not without paying taxes you can't. The US government charges you $2000 to renounce your citizenship and if your assets are worth more than $2 million they will give you a massive tax bill as though you had sold all those assets. Furthermore, you can only renounce citizenship if you accept the citizenship of another country, which kind of defeats the point you're making - you can't actually exit the system legally.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-lega...

No requirement to have another citizenship to renounce.

It is well documented what kind of poisons got added to food in the 1800s before governments started to regulate things.

I assume you are replying to "You are making the assumption that there are high levels of lead in the food BECAUSE food makers want to kill you." so I have to ask: is it because they want to kill customers or not?

They don't _want_ to do anything but maximize profits - regulating the level of lead in those products directly impacts the bottom line, hence the need for regulation.

The free market is awesome, but it can't effectively price externalities, especially those which have diffuse origins or targets.

OK, but this thread began with someone saying: "If food makers (or the makers of school supplies in this case) didn't want to kill you, then why is there high levels of lead in the food, a substance which is known to be very toxic?"

It is making the assumption that they are doing it to kill you against which I spoke.

Well too be fair in the 1800s we really didn't know how poisonous a lot of those things were. Rich people ate off fancy dinnerware painted in lead.

Read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

A novel that triggered a major investigation, followed by food safety regulation, and testing in the USA within a year of its publication. It also halved US meat exports and created what became the FDA.

You want to take that away again? God help us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19869946

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